ZBrushCentral

Gnarled Tree

ZBrush Artworks
#1

I was after something that had a vaguely human shape. For a texture I wanted something somewhat like corkwood. It’s meant to be a bit stylized. The final will have moss and vines. I also want to add on smaller branches with some dried leaves. All of that will be layered on. It’ll all be sparce, just enough to break things up and make sure it reads as more treelike. I thought it was kind of a fun shape and texture from a few angles. The top row on the comp are the likely angles. I’m leaning on the side of the one in the upper left and have it framing the image on the right side. If I go with that one I’ll definately have to tweak the branches a bit. I’d have loved to have had more branches but I was wary of poly count. I can always add more in the comp.

[Tree.jpg](javascript:zb_insimg(‘18109’,‘Tree.jpg’,1,0))

Attachments

Tree-Comp.jpg

#2

The form looks fantastic - looking forward to seeing it textured.

#3

Very Pompeii-esque…
:+1:small_orange_diamond:+1:small_orange_diamond:+1:
LemonNado

#4

hi belseth

Froyd had posted some cool wood materialshere that you could test drive to get idea if how you are sculpting is going the way you would like. I use em as stand ins quite a bit.

#5

Thanks for the link, I’ll try them out. Not really sure how I want to go with the texture and may try several different ways and see what works best. Even considering doing a bump map for fine textures. I’ll see after I upgrade my machine this week. I keep hitting my head against the ram ceiling. Also I may render it in another package for the final element. There is one way around all the displacement issues I’ve had, export the full res model. I’ve been doing renders in VUE 5 this way. The problem then is I have to be careful with the final poly count. So long as I don’t go past 1.5 million I’m okay, still crashes most of my software trying to push that much around. I threw the tree into VUE 5 and kept crashing it and it’s only around 500,000 at this point. I’ll paste in a test render. This is with just a rock texture I applied. The default version of the texture doesn’t look very natural so I tweaked the scale and mixing on the moss. Never intended it for a tree but it’ll give some idea. I’m new to VUE 5 but I think I can using mixing to give it a mapped texture with bump mapping and all and still add in their moss. I like the blending of the moss and it reads demensional. The setting is just a quick and dirty VUE 5 set I did for testing purposes. I like to come up with stock sets to try things out in. It’d look a lot better with radiosity or HDRI but that’s when VUE 5 chokes. The original render was 1600 res so it’d take days to render. It’s fairly fast with most other lighting types. The really complex math brings it to it’s knees though.

[Tree-Test-Lake.jpg](javascript:zb_insimg(‘18130’,‘Tree-Test-Lake.jpg’,1,0))

#6

Hi, nice place! Please put some fish. I should like to fish there some weeks. Your picture seems to invite me! Nice work and forget the unstable Vue software.

#7

Thanks. I’ve actually got much nicer scenes I just picked this one to try out the shape of the tree. I’m really having a blast with VUE 5 after a rocky start, had registration problems that took weeks and endless phone calls to sort out. Generally I haven’t had too much stability trouble with VUE 5 but the scene is north of 2 million polys and I have 1 gig of ram. Later this week I’m upping that to 4 gig. VUE 5 gets really addictive. At first I thought it was too simplistic to do much with but the more I dug the more I found. Pretty powerful. The biggest complaint I have is the speed of the rendering engine on complex lighting set ups. The basic ones are fast. The renders are beautiful though. Just wish it would import/export to either Maya or Lightwave. I’d love to be able to incorporate some animated characters.

Got to say you did give me a mental picture I may try some time. I’d love to do an image of a kid half asleep fishing on a river bank with several sturgeon sized fish he had already caught laying next to him. Could be a fun fantasy scene. Maybe after I get caught up.

#8

Very nice ambient.
Why don’t you try to make a “darker version”,like a SWAMP.You can put inside this swamp horrible creatures like undeads or a swamp-creature.

See you,MattHHH:cool:

#9

Buen montaje Belseth. Has conseguido que la escena parezca real. Más que una ilustración parece una foto.:+1:

#10

It’s actually for a swamp image I’m working on. I’ve been doing various elements for it but I have yet to start on the environment itself, that’s probably a few weeks off. The scene is of pygmies fighting a sauropod dinosaur. Basically the African dinosaur encounter that was supposed to have happened in the late 50s. The dinosaur is nearly done and I’ll post some renders of it when it’s finished. The whole scene is fairly elaborate so it’s going to take awhile. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t started on the scene. I need the idividual elements at least roughed out first so I can place them and lock down their positions. There’s a lot of splashing water and such that needs to be modeled to match. Should be fun when it’s done just don’t want to rush it.

#11

Has there been a flooding? The trees in the back look drowned???
Or did the treeman put a spell on life in the pond as they knew it :qu:

Mmmmmmm…I love Trees. Nice scene BTW…romantic.

Yainderidoo

:lol:

#12

Belseth, have you checked the e-on forums for the latest thoughts on out of memory errors in Vue 5i ? If you are using Windows, there seems to be evidence that adding more RAM probably won’t make much difference. If you’re upgrading your memory solely on the basis of the VUE problem, it might be worth holding off for a while. VUE just doesn’t seem to handle non native content very well. Simply moving things around will use up resources that are never recovered, unless you save the work and then reload it. Having said that, I’ve got to agree with everything else you said about VUE :slight_smile:

#13

Thanks. I’ll check the forums. Actually 90% of why I’m adding the ram is for Zbrush, I keep maxing out Zbrush. I thought the extra ram might help in VUE 5. Too bad there’s no way to convert the models to a native format for VUE 5. Most of the existing models are low poly. I thought part of the problem was that I was trying to push around half million poly models. It only seems to crash when I’m moving or sizing the high poly models. I do wonder it if it’s the non native or it’s the high poly models that’s the problem since all the native models are low poly. The highest ones have leaves and those may be propagated rather than modeled. I’ll definately check on VUE 5 forums. The two most addictive softwares I own are Zbrush and VUE 5. Not enough hours in the day.

#14

Hello Belseth,

Gee, i’m late for tha scene i believe :laughing: Only saw your post today :wink:
I really like the swamp and the human-like tree :+1: It’s coming along very well.
Is the swamp gona be part of the Sauropod scene? Hmm…
I can’t wait to see more updates to come…

Cheers Bel!
Kev

#15

The tree is for the dino scene but the pond is just a test scene. The swamp is going to be darker and moodier. I just wanted to throw the tree in a set and see how it looked. I want the texture of the tree to be mostly hand painted as well. I may try to use the proceedural moss though since it looks good. The rock texture I used looks okay but I can do a lot better with a custom texture. The biggest problem with proceedurals on trees is the branches always come out lumpy and there’s just no way around it. Rather do it by hand.